“Without obesity, 70 to 80% of diabetes would not exist”

Health

The president of the Spanish Diabetes Society (SED), Antonio Pérez, has warned that the longer a person is exposed to this risk factor, the more likely they are to suffer from this pathology, especially if they have a family history

Pérez has made these statements during the press conference to present the
33rd congress of the SEDin which fifty "prestigious" speakers will participate in a "reference" scientific event to address diabetes that will include more than 40 sessions, three plenary conferences, 15 round tables, 14 industry symposiums and eight meetings with experts during the three days of this first face-to-face symposium after the start of the pandemic.

Thus, the president of the SED has stated that if obesity occurs at the beginning of a child's life, he will be
“many years exposed” to a factor that determines the predisposition to the disease and, therefore, will have a higher risk of suffering from adult-onset diabetes, as well as more cardiovascular diseases.

In this sense, Pérez has asked
"give visibility" to diabetes because, in his opinion, the relevance it has in the general population "is far below the consequences of the disease", for which he has said that it is necessary "to transfer that
it is a serious disease«.

Asked if they will address any scientific advances related to this disease, he expressed hope that
in 2023 a drug will begin to be marketed with various mechanisms of action focused on achieving "significant weight loss".

About the injection that is already used in some patients of
Diabetes type 1, the president of the SED has explained that it acts with gastrointestinal hormones that help produce insulin. “It is not a panacea, but it is an important tool”, he pointed out.

Regarding the effects of the pandemic
covid-19 in the disease, has stated that it has affected above all the monitoring of patients with
type 2 diabetes.

“During confinement, by not being able to go out and not doing physical activity, it has contributed to the
impaired glycemic controlto which is added that many patients stopped going to health centers«, has indicated Perez, who has lamented that the consequences of covid in patients with diabetes »will suffer for many years« and will mainly result in having a worse prognosis for people who have been through that situation.

Regarding the possible drop in diagnoses due to the fact that people go to primary care centers less, he has elaborated on the fact that some studies calculate that
Diagnoses have been reduced by 40% despite the fact that risk factors such as reduced physical exercise or weight gain have increased.

“It is to be expected that there will be a bag of undiagnosed or delayed-diagnosed patients. Patients are being diagnosed in much more serious conditions", reflected the doctor, who said that one of the main challenges of public health is to achieve equity in treatment, without differences in access to certain resources between autonomous communities, provinces or even cities.

For his part, the president of the local organizing committee,
Pedro de Pablos, endocrinologist in Gran Canariahas referred to the high prevalence of diabetes in the archipelago, which he has mainly attributed to the change in the production model in the last 40 years and to the change in eating habits.

“It has gone from the predominant activity being the primary sector in the 1960s to now being the service sector. In other words, it has gone from using the body as a work tool to having
much more sedentary habitswhich is added to a loss of traditional food for another type of food“, he has deepened.

"In studies conducted in
Canary Islands we know that when a person has a first-degree family history, if it is associated with
abdominal obesitythe probability of
being diabetic reaches 80%«, expressed the doctor, who has expressed his opinion, regarding the seriousness that this pathology can have, that »if diabetes were spoken of as a cancer, people would take it with more respect«.

Likewise, the president of the scientific committee of the Congress, Franz Martín Bermudo, highlighted the participation of Dr. Alexander Kleger, from the Ulm Internal Medicine Clinic (Germany), who
will show at the inaugural conference the latest findings on the influence of covid on the pancreas and its impact on people with diabetes.

As for the
scientific goals that diabetes experts face, Martín Bermudo has emphasized the importance of advancing in the reason for the disease in the case of type 1 diabetes, which is autoimmune, and the need to find more biomarkers that allow it to be detected earlier .

Regarding type 2 diabetes, he has also considered it necessary to find more biomarkers of risk and evolution of the disease, as well as to seek a better understanding of why some
patients develop some types of complications and not others.